Dr. Rafael Davalos' research interests are in microfluidics for personalized medicine and developing technologies for cancer therapy. He is most recognized for co-inventing Irreversible Electroporation (IRE), a minimally invasive non-thermal surgical technique to treat unresectable tumors near critical structures such as major blood vessels and nerves. The technology has been used to help thousands of patients worldwide with a second-generation version in clinical trials. Davalos has authored 150 peer-reviewed articles and has 47 issued patents (72 h-index, >18,000 citations) and has secured over $37M in research funding with $10M his share. His patents have been licensed to 7 companies. He has been a plenary speaker for several prestigious venues including the International Symposium of the Bioelectrochemistry Society, the World Congress on Electroporation, and the Society of Cryobiology Annual Meeting. 

The Panitch lab research has focused on the extracellular matrix (ECM) and how matrix signals affect tissue regeneration, including nerve regeneration, wound healing and angiogenesis, cartilage and vascular. More recently, the lab has focused on the proteoglycan component of the ECM. Proteoglycans are critical components of tissue function. They influence matrix organization, the viscoelastic properties of the matrix, access of enzymes to the matrix and serve as a protective barrier as in the case of the glycocalyx. Proteoglycans are difficult to synthesize because of the complex post translational modifications and the complexity of carbohydrate chemistry. The Panitch laboratory has demonstrated that proteoglycan function can largely be recapitulated by conjugating short, bioactive peptide sequences to GAGs. The peptide sequences direct the GAG to its target and ensure that it is held in place, similarly to how native proteoglycans function. The lab has used proteoglycan mimetic strategies to develop therapeutics to treat osteoarthritis, improve wound healing, and treat diseased blood vessels.

Saurabh Sinha received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2002, and after post-doctoral work at the Rockefeller University with Eric Siggia, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2005, where he held the positions of Founder Professor in Computer Science and Director of Computational Genomics in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology until 2022. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 2022, as Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Engineering, with joint appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering. Sinha’s research is in the area of bioinformatics, with a focus on regulatory genomics and systems biology. Sinha is an NSF CAREER award recipient and has been funded by NIH, NSF and USDA. He co-directed an NIH BD2K Center of Excellence and was a thrust lead in the NSF AI Institute at UIUC. He led the educational program of the Mayo Clinic-University of Illinois Alliance, and co-led data science education for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Sinha has served as Program co-Chair of the annual RECOMB Regulatory and Systems Genomics conference and served on the Board of Directors for the International Society for Computational Biology (2018-2021). He was a recipient of the University Scholar award of the University of Illinois, and selected as a Fellow of the AIMBE in 2018.

David’s varied interests have fueled an unusual educational background that fuses engineering, microsystem design, biology, and clinical research. David received his PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, under the tutelage of one of the early microsystems pioneers, Albert P. Pisano, PhD. Driven by a desire to see new types of sensors in the clinic, David undertook a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical and clinical research with Wilbur A. Lam, MD, PhD, in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Working at the intersection of these fields, David has authored or contributed to publications in Nature Materials, Nature Communications, PNAS, and Blood. 

My lab, Biohybrid System Laboratory, is interested in elucidating how biological systems coordinate the hierarchical structures and functions of their individual components, in order to produce emergent physical behaviors, and how disrupting this coordination potentiates disease. We seek to design, build, and test a hierarchy of biohybrid systems capable of reproducing the targeted behaviors. Our primary interest is coordinated activation and contraction of tissue- and organ-level cardiac and skeletal muscle systems. To pursue this goal, we focus on the development of biohybrid fabrication methods and measurement systems through the combined application of genetic tools, induced pluripotent stem cells, tissue engineering, microfabrication, electronics, optics, and feedback control. The resulting findings and technical developments will be translated into various applications such as (1) stem cell-based functional assays for personalized disease diagnosis and treatment and (2) new types of biohybrid actuators for creating biological autonomous systems.

Dr. Leslie Chan is an Assistant Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Tech School of Engineering and Emory School of Medicine. Her research program integrates core and emerging principles from drug delivery, biomaterials development, and chemical biology to engineer diagnostic and therapeutic solutions for infectious disease, microbiome dysbiosis, and inflammatory diseases. Dr. Chan earned her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Tech and her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Washington with Professor Suzie Pun. She completed her postdoctoral training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor Sangeeta Bhatia. Dr. Chan is the recipient of an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award.

Eberhard Voit’s research interests are in the area of complex biomedical systems. Work in his lab focuses on genomic, metabolic, and signaling systems with applications reaching from microbial and plant systems to human diseases. Voit has authored or co-authored about two hundred fifty scientific articles and book chapters as well as several books. Voit is an elected a fellow in the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Denis Tsygankov, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech School of Engineering and Emory University School of Medicine. 

Dr. Tsygankov is interested in developing and applying computational methods, including mathematical modeling, simulations, and computer vision approaches to understand complex multi-scale physiological processes including vasculogenesis, morphogenesis, and cancer. 

He is a member of the Cell and Molecular Biology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute.

Garrett Stanley is the McCamish Foundation Distinguished Chair in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and is the Co-Director of the Georgia Tech Neural Engineering Center. He has formal training, both at undergraduate and doctorate levels, in engineering (specifically trained in Control Theory through all of his graduate work), and has worked extensively in the field of neuroscience, specifically in sensory processing in the brain, and more specifically in vision and somatosensation (touch). 

From 1999 to 2007, he was an Associate Professor in the Division of Engineering & Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he was the leader of the Harvard Biocontrols Laboratory. Professor Stanley is now a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech/Emory University (2008-2013 Associate Professor, 2014-present Full Professor), and leads several programmatic efforts at the interface between basic neuroscience and neurotechnology (Co-Direct the GT Neural Engineering Center, Direct Computational Neuroscience training program, Director of Graduate Studies, etc.). In terms of research, he is the leader of the Neural Coding group in the Laboratory for Neuroengineering. 

The research of his group has been funded by the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, DARPA, and several private foundations. Prof. Stanley’s group routinely publishes our research in the top Neuroscience journals, along with more technical work in engineering journals. He is considered a leader in the field nationally and internationally.